Zell, Chris wrote:
This lack of additional generating capacity need is partly why a Really Good Battery would have such a dramatic effect on society. You create electric cars that run much cheaper per mile without much need for additional fossil fuel generator use. Indeed, I think that such a device would encourage an explosion of alternative development that would quickly challenge utilities fossil fuel use.
Don't forget, Chris: it works the other way too. Sometimes superior technology creates the opportunity, and sometimes opportunity gives rise to superior technology. This is what is happening now with batteries. We do not have Really Good Batteries but we do have Considerably Improved Batteries, such as the latest generation that are going into hybrid cars and the upcoming plug-in hybrid cars. Hundreds of thousands of hybrid cars have been manufactured and this has created a large market for improved batteries, and a flood of R&D funding. This, in turn, may eventually give rise to radically improved versions and the Holy Grail you speak of: the Really Good Battery.
Batteries also improved over the last 20 years thanks to the demand for cell phones and portable computers.
Persistent demand and a flood of R&D funding will not produce a radical breakthrough such as cold fusion. That sort of thing only comes along once every century or so, and it is the product of genius with no connection to the quotidian world of money and business. (Believe me, CF researchers live in a mental space light years away from what usually passes for reality.) But R&D funding will produce incremental improvements, and that may be enough to produce the Really Good Battery. Incremental improvements brought us microprocessors with 100 million components and 20 GB hard disks that fit into your pocket. Such things would have seemed utterly incredible 30 years ago -- to me, anyway. Yet they did not require any fundamental or surprising discoveries, just persistent slogging and one small improvement after another.
- Jed
